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TRUE glue: this fall's consensus cure for the blue-state blues seems to be a turning inward to home and hearth -- a cure that, scarily for some, red states can also easily embrace.

For those who grew up viewing the first incarnation of THE GOURMET COOKBOOK (Houghton Mifflin, $40) as "the doorway to a magic land" of sophistication, as the editor of this completely revised edition, Ruth Reichl, writes in her introduction, there was something gloriously unreal about the recipes. They didn't really need to work. (Although most of them did.) They just needed to transport you to a world that seemed distant and finer, where the exotic seemed both alluring and controllable. It was escapism, of course, but has escapism ever seemed more rational?

With its 1,000 recipes, tested and retested, this new edition means business. So, as always, does Cook's Illustrated, the magazine that takes testing to a sometimes tendentious degree that many of its readers find reassuring. In THE BEST NEW RECIPE (America's Test Kitchen, $35), Cook's Illustrated offers its own 1,000 dishes, with a focus more on technique than on spanning the globe. Gourmet's omnibus volume draws authority not just from the magazine's knowledgeable and experienced staff but also from a roster of contemporary food experts and even some from the past. India and Mexico now take pride of place alongside France and Italy, but many other countries that were only hinted at in the (surprisingly cosmopolitan) original are heard from too. This is Gourmet's state of the world report, 60 years on, and it's worth keeping as a kitchen reference.

Harold McGee's classic ON FOOD AND COOKING: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen (Scribner, $35) has also just been revised. You'll want to get the new edition even if you have the old one -- or give this as a gift to people who somehow missed it the first time around.

For friends who are just learning to cook, try THE GOOD COOK (Stewart, Tabori & Chang, $40), by Anne Willan, an English-born, French-trained, longtime American teacher who radiates brisk common sense. This is what, in the days of the original Gourmet magazine, would have been called a bride's cookbook -- a lucid overview of a variety of foods and techniques.

Assuming we're settling in for a long, spiritually challenging winter, comforting and fragrant food seems the thing to be cooking. You'll find just that in Molly Stevens's ALL ABOUT BRAISING: The Art of Uncomplicated Cooking (Norton, $35). Stevens is a beautifully clear writer who likes to teach; I wasn't surprised to learn that she was once on the staff of La Varenne, Willan's cooking school in Burgundy. Some of her tempting recipes are very easy (sweet braised whole scallions with lemon and tarragon), some more elaborate (salmon fillets braised in pinot noir with bacon and mushrooms). All are transformative.

BEANS (Running Press, paper, $19.95), by Aliza Green, is a book I've been waiting for. In an extensive introductory chapter that she calls "a legume primer," the author, a professional cook and self-taught culinary scholar, explains the differences between Old World and New World beans and sorts out the bewildering if beautiful variety of heirloom beans -- how they taste, how to cook them, how to buy them. And she gives plenty of practical and scientific information on carminatives (such a nicer word than "anti-flatulents"). She also provides good-looking recipes for bean soups and casseroles, and even bean sweets from all over the world.

For an Italian detour, I'd recommend the daintily designed FAGIOLI: The Bean Cuisine of Italy (Rodale, $22.95), by a friend, Judith Barrett, for recipes that demonstrate her deep understanding of the Italian kitchen. Its highlights include a Roman stew of beef shin and chickpeas from Paola DiMauro, a woman who has often been called Italy's best home cook.

BRUCE AIDELLS'S COMPLETE BOOK OF PORK: A Guide to Buying, Storing, and Cooking the World's Favorite Meat (HarperCollins, $29.95), written with Lisa Weiss, offers convincing proof of pork's infinite utility. Aidells, a well-known sausage maker, has done important work here for home cooks; the chart with his recommended temperatures for cooking all cuts of pork is worth the price of the book alone. (My favorite of his many tips, both specific and general: Don't grill in sandals or bare feet.) There are, of course, plenty of good recipes, like real Hungarian goulash and a Bolognese sauce you'll want in quantity to get you through the winter.

Pork and beans are a Southern staple, and the American cookbook of the season is sure to become one as well: FRANK STITT'S SOUTHERN TABLE (Artisan, $40). Its author is the kind of cook you hope will come along more often -- someone both experienced with world cuisine and rooted in the ingredients and style of home. (The food at Stitt's wonderful Highlands Bar and Grill in Birmingham is both Provençal and Southern; his two great culinary influences are his grandparents' farm in rural northern Alabama and his restaurant training in Provence.) In this handsome book, Stitt offers the sort of food you want to make and eat right away: pork chops and brochettes with creamy grits and Maker's Mark bourbon sauce, lemon buttermilk chess tart with a cornmeal-flecked butter crust. It's not surprising that one of his mentors was Richard Olney and one of his heroes the late Bill Neal, another son of the South who championed local cuisine. Neal's earliest menus, are, as it happens, recalled in the recently published REMEMBERING BILL NEAL: Favorite Recipes From a Life in Cooking (University of North Carolina, $22.95) by his former wife and business partner, Moreton Neal.

Sometimes, the core values of a whole country can be symbolized by one kitchen implement, as Sharon Kramis and her daughter, Julie Kramis Hearne, demonstrate in THE CAST IRON SKILLET COOKBOOK: Recipes for the Best Pan in Your Kitchen (Sasquatch, paper, $16.95). Solid, plain, steady, trustworthy -- this might be the tool to reunite the two Americas! The authors, who live in Seattle, have an instinctive sense of all-American cooking (Sharon Kramis was a protégée of James Beard), as shown by their recipes for open-face sloppy Joes, chicken with herbed dumplings and cornbread. But there are interesting variants too, like fennel-ricotta skillet bread and brown-sugar coffee cake.

Another small, appealing book is Jessica B. Harris's ON THE SIDE (Simon & Schuster, $23), a collection of slaws, relishes, salads, pickles and condiments that roams the globe but mostly sticks close to home. Many of Harris's recipes would yield lovely gifts for holiday giving -- and the book wouldn't be a bad gift either, for this always engaging writer's notes on her personal and professional culinary history.

Any cook who wants to pack maximal punch into a single dish (say, a bachelor in his first apartment) will like THE FEARLESS CHEF: Innovative Recipes From the Edge of American Cuisine (Adams Media, paper, $16.95), by Andy Husbands and Joe Yonan. I know Husbands, a Boston cook much admired by his peers, to be a keen cultural observer, a quality that comes through here (despite the messy design) in intensely flavored recipes like Moroccan-style roasted monkfish. This book would make a good gift paired with THE CONTEMPORARY ENCYCLOPEDIA OF HERBS & SPICES: Seasonings for the Global Kitchen (Wiley, $40), by Tony Hill, a respected Seattle spice merchant.

Anyone who misses fancy dinner-party food -- the kind my mother and uncle relied on finding in the issues of Gourmet they passed back and forth in the 1950's and 60's -- will find it in PATRICK O'CONNELL'S REFINED AMERICAN CUISINE (Bulfinch, $45). At the Inn at Little Washington in rural Virginia, O'Connell and his partner, Reinhardt Lynch, give their patrons dinner parties of a kind my mother and uncle would have recognized and thoroughly enjoyed. Although he's one of the most celebrated professional chefs in the country, O'Connell taught himself to cook by reading the best books of the late 1960's and 70's, and at heart his food is gussied-up home cooking. Today's apprentice hosts and hostesses can impress their guests with his recipes for camembert triangles in phyllo dough and veal medallions with country ham ravioli. Maybe O'Connell's ability to tell a good story -- another key to successful entertaining -- will inspire them too.

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Lidia Matticchio Bastianich, the accomplished restaurateur and television star, focuses on the family in LIDIA'S FAMIILY TABLE (Knopf, $35), a copious offering of Italian-themed recipes with much to please everyone, especially if you like pasta. Somehow, in her hands even the simplest sauces always taste sumptuous. Added attractions are Bastianich's informative notes, sprinkled throughout the book, on Italian ingredients and her advice on using leftovers.

Nigella Lawson, another multimedia star, whose column appears in The New York Times, offers recipes for every occasion and holiday in FEAST: Food That Celebrates Life (Hyperion, $35). Lawson is always full of good sense, but she strikes me as exceptionally sensible in her chapter on cooking for children.

There's nothing new in Ina Garten's BAREFOOT IN PARIS: Easy French Food You Can Make at Home (Clarkson Potter, $35), another book by a very successful author, who got her start as the proprietor of the chic Hamptons food shop Barefoot Contessa. She doesn't provide all that many recipes, and you've probably heard of or cooked some version of every single one. Why bother buying this? Because each recipe is completely persuasive -- this is food you know you'll enjoy cooking and eating, brought to its simplest essence. Garten is popular because she knows what home cooks will stand still for and because she makes everything attractive.

Thomas Keller's BOUCHON (Artisan, $50) is similarly saturated with color photographs and covers much of the same territory as Garten's book. But Keller, a chef who revels in the complex at restaurants like the French Laundry and Per Se, always goes the long way round. For this lavish account of the more straightforward brasserie he opened on the same street as his main restaurant in the Napa Valley, he has reunited many members of the same team that made "The French Laundry Cookbook" go back for multiple reprints (Susie Heller, Michael Ruhlman and Deborah Jones, with the addition of Jeffrey Cerciello, Bouchon's executive chef). Unlike the vast majority of chef's cookbooks, this one explains every step in clear detail, so nothing need be intimidating. And the scope of most of the recipes -- quiche made cloudlike by aerating the batter in a blender, roast chicken with a ragout of wild mushrooms -- is narrower than that of its predecessor. The book is also more relaxed. This legendarily exacting chef even admits to enjoying some very simple and soul-satisfying pleasures: "Honestly, it's pure joy to eat a roasted beet the moment it's out of the foil."

To go further abroad and keep learning, open THE OLIVE AND THE CAPER: Adventures in Greek Cooking (Workman, paper, $19.95), Susanna Hoffman's primer on Greek food, history and culture. I'm planning on making winter staples of her baked white fish fillets with blood orange, sweet wine and bay leaf and her beef chuck baked with Kalamata olives and 100 cloves of garlic. And while they cook, I know I'll have plenty to read in the surrounding text: like appropriately potted histories of the Minoans, the caper bush and Greek yogurt.

Marcella Hazan says that MARCELLA SAYS . . . (HarperCollins, $29.95) may be her last book, and she did just turn 80. But that's no excuse for her to stop giving us the sort of culinary insights no one else can, or the sort of recipes whose spare novelty is utterly irresistible. Most of all, her book delivers the sort of parting wisdom her fans will refuse to believe is parting. (If you're looking for flavor, she advises, "look no farther than the heart of the cook.")

DESSERT UNIVERSITY (Simon & Schuster, $40) is an unprepossessing book with a plain-Jane layout and a few humdrum pictures. But Roland Mesnier, the author (with Lauren Chattman), moonlighted as a teacher of pastry making during the many years he was White House pastry chef, and his unconventional techniques -- eggless chocolate mousse, for instance, made with just whipped cream, or meringue-based chocolate mousse without butterfat -- are well worth exploring. Lightness and fresh taste are his goals, and his unfrilly, sensible advice, based on a lifetime of experience, is well worth taking. Mesnier's recipe for blueberry muffins, made with buttermilk and a few whipped egg whites and sporting sugar-caramelized tops, will be one you turn to again and again. And could the bakeries of the world please take to heart his observation that "there's nothing worse than a heavy muffin, especially a large heavy muffin"?

The instructional baking book of the season is Jeffrey Hamelman's BREAD: A Baker's Book of Techniques and Recipes (Wiley, $40). Hamelman, who teaches baking at the King Arthur Flour Company in Norwich, Vt., used to run a bakery in Brattleboro whose sourdough ryes were unequaled in this country. His lessons on hand techniques and his notes on different types of flour are especially valuable, and he includes recipes for many of his signature sourdough ryes and Germanic whole-grain breads. (Yes, these are heavy breads. They're supposed to be heavy.)

Maggie Glezer also examines rye bread in A BLESSING OF BREAD (Artisan, $35), a collection of Jewish breads, but you'll probably head straight for her many appealing recipes for challah.

Karen Barker is one of the country's best working bakers, a Brooklyn girl gone South; she now makes desserts at the Magnolia Grill in Durham, N.C., where her husband, Ben, is the chef. In SWEET STUFF: Karen Barker's American Desserts (University of North Carolina, $29.95), she covers many bases, but the important chapters are the ones on cobblers and pies. Keep an eye out (and an oven preheated) for her deep-dish brown-sugar plum cobbler, maple bourbon sweet potato pie and peach cobbler with cornmeal cream biscuits and more bourbon -- remember, we're down South.

If it's chocolate you need for comfort, amuse yourself with THE GREAT BOOK OF CHOCOLATE (Ten Speed, paper, $16.95), a chunky breast-pocket-size book in which David Lebovitz provides an overview of chocolate making and baking that is as entertaining as it is enthusiastic.

I feel about the King Arthur people the way so many cooks do about Cook's Illustrated magazine: what they say goes. So even if the cookies in THE KING ARTHUR FLOUR COOKIE COMPANION (Countryman, $29.95) aren't startlingly original, I know I'll be given just the right advice when I set out to make them and I won't have a worry from start to finish. And, in fact, I do want to make the book's brown sugar almond crisps (thin sugar cookies with roasted salted almonds pressed into the top), its English digestive biscuits with whole-wheat flour and make-in-a-flash chocolate chip cookie bars, inspired by Ruth Wakefield. You remember Mrs. Wakefield? Proprietor of that little Massachusetts restaurant called the Toll House? Whatever you may have been thinking, Massachusetts really can unite the country again.